Anyway… on to the point of this post. While scanning the logs I noticed that someone at O2 likes their beer… the server names of their mobile phone network seem to be named after breweries. Although it is the major multi-national breweries so whoever named them is probably not a real ale drinker.

Here are the names of some of the O2 hosts from 193.113.200.0/255

heineken.london.02.net.
guinness-eri0-2.london.02.net.
murphys-eri0-2.london.02.net.
beamish-eri0-2.london.02.net.
caffreys-eri0-2.london.02.net.
radius-vip.london.02.net.
alaskan-eri0-2.london.02.net.
ushers-eri0-2.london.02.net.
emu-eri0-2.london.02.net.
skunk-eri0-2.london.02.net.
heineken-bge0-1.london.02.net.
gmi-mis-db1.london.02.net.
gmi-mis-p2.london.02.net.
heineken-bge0-2.london.02.net.
tetley.london.02.net.
tetley-ce0-1.london.02.net.
tetley-ce0-2.london.02.net.
heineken-bge0-3.london.02.net.
carlsberg.london.02.net.
alaskan.london.02.net.
ushers.london.02.net.
carlsberg-bge0-1.london.02.net.
tunji.london.02.net.
carlsberg-bge0-2.london.02.net.
carlsberg-bge0-3.london.02.net.
ralph.london.02.net.
dave.london.02.net.
guinness.london.02.net.
kronenbourg.london.02.net.
murphys.london.02.net.
spitfire.london.02.net.
spitfire-ce0-1.london.02.net.
spitfire-ce0-2.london.02.net.
bengal-fmagcgi310.london.02.net.
guinness-eri0-1.london.02.net.
murphys-eri0-1.london.02.net.
beamish-eri0-1.london.02.net.
gmi-mis-db2-0.london.02.net.
caffreys-eri0-1.london.02.net.
register.genie.co.uk.
murphys-eri0-3.london.02.net.
beamish-eri0-3.london.02.net.
caffreys-eri0-3.london.02.net.
alaskan-eri0-1.london.02.net.
ushers-eri0-1.london.02.net.
uma-bkp.london.02.net.
watergate.genie.co.uk.
kronenbourg-bge0-1.london.02.net.
dns0.02.net.
dns1.02.net.
beamish.london.02.net.
caffreys.london.02.net.
emu-eri0-1.london.02.net.
arsenic-2.london.02.net.
kilkenny.london.02.net.
alaskan-eri0-3.london.02.net.
ushers-eri0-3.london.02.net.
skunk-eri0-3.london.02.net.
emu-eri0-3.london.02.net.
emu.london.02.net.
skunk.london.02.net.
skunk-eri0-1.london.02.net.
bass.london.02.net.
bass-ce0-1.london.02.net.
bass-ce0-2.london.02.net.
kronenbourg-bge0-2.london.02.net.
kronenbourg-bge0-3.london.02.net.
stella.london.02.net.
courage.london.02.net.
courage-ce0-1.london.02.net.
courage-ce0-2.london.02.net.
stella-bge0-1.london.02.net.
stella-bge0-2.london.02.net.
stella-bge0-3.london.02.net.

It follows the progress of the first few years of the development of an Open Source project called Chandler. The project which was intended to take one year was just beginning to get its first features usable after about 3 years, and the project is still continuing now and still only has a very small subset of the original desired features.

There is a lot in here that other software developers will recognise from their own projects. I was particularly interested in Lisa Dusseault‘s involvement with WebDAV as I was developing a WebDAV server at around the same time as the events in this book were unfolding and her book about the WebDAV protocol was my bible at the start of the project.

The book covers a lot of material in a readable narrative way. For example,near the begining is a section on why programmer’s count from zero, and how this is responsible for quite a lot of bugs (of course I believe it is the non-programming humans who are at fault).

Along the way, the author takes a couple of chapters (Chapters nine and ten) off from the chronological flow to go back and discuss the history of software development, how we are having the same problems now as we were in the 60′s and how Fred Brooke’s Mythical Man Month is just as relevant today as it was when it was first written.

There is some discussion that perhaps the way we develop software now is never going to work, and there may be a science of software yet to be discovered, perhaps based more on a biological approach. The book suggests that in comparison to architecture we are still at the pryamid building stage of piling rocks on top of each other requiring enormous numbers of people and work, and that we are yet to discover the arch.

This was an easy book to read, very addictive making you want to read one more chapter… It has made me eager to go and investigate a few ideas, in particular to read up more about Smalltalk, from which the concept of OOP seems have originated. There is a quote from Alan Kay (inventor of Smalltalk) “I made up the term object-oriented… and I can tell you, I did not have C++ in mind“. I also plan to look into the programming language Squeak. Smalltalk seems to be of increasing significance to me since I am currently working with Objective-C on the Mac and Symbian C++ which both borrow concepts from Smalltalk, and understanding their origins may help me to understand them better and make better use of their features instead of trying to pretend they are another dialect of C++.

I would recommend this book to non-computer people as it will give them a better understanding of what it is we do as software developers. All technical terms and acronyms are discussed in an understandable way before they are used.

I would also recommend this book to software developers as it will make you think about your own projects and perhaps see a lot of similarities, and hopefully learn to do something about it.

This is a few notes about what I remember from the ACCU session.

Unfortunately I didn’t make any notes, so my recollection may be wrong.

I think the panelists were (someone please correct me if my memory is wrong):

• David Wood from Symbian
• Russel Winder (advocator of dynamic programming languages such as groovy, python and ruby… who later in the conference gave a presentation entitled “C++ has no useful purpose”)
• John Pagonis (Symbian OS developer)
• Jo Stichbury (from Symbian and previously Nokia-NGage)

Mary Poppendieck (Lean Software author) was in the audience and contributed a lot.

Unfortunately I didn’t make notes… a few points I recall coming out of it are:

When we were young, computers were new and it was the in-thing to be using them, but now they are old-hat and young people are used to very media-rich instant gratification consumer electronic technology such as games consoles (Xbox, PlayStation, Wii), iPods, etc.

Even if they could program mobile phones, they may not want to unless there was a very easy way to get into it with instant results. They are not going to want to learn how to write all the scaffolding of most languages just to get a hello-world application to build compared to the simple

10 print “hello myname”
20 goto 10

that we all started with.

Most programming languages are too complicated to get started with. C++ and Java require a lot of scaffolding to get even the simplest bit of code to compile.

A lot of effort is required to obtain and install the development tools and environments, so you already have to be heavily motivated to even make a start.

Dynamic and interpreted languages such as Python, Ruby and Groovy may provide an easier entry to programming.

Products such as AMOS were popular in the 80′s and 90′s allowing people to write games for Amiga in an easy to learn basic-like scripting language. A couple of developers in the room said that this was how they got interested in software development.

Someone asked if it really mattered whether young people get interested in programming. I pointed out that there does appear to be a shortage of new programmers, particularly in the games development industry. Most programmers are from our generation.

Mary made the point that young people need a demonstration of why it is important to study things. For example if you want to write cool computer software in the future then you need to learn certain subjects in school. It is difficult for young people to be motivated to learn certain subjects like Mathematics, Physics, Computer Science, without being able to see a direct use for them. She provided an anecdote about how when she worked at 3M they would provide talks at local schools with visually exciting demonstrations (eg. liquid nitrogen) and then said that if you want to do this when you are older, then you’d better do well in your science subjects!

Russell pointed out that IT education in schools is appalling, teaching people how to use office tools rather than what computers can be used for.

Mary also pointed out that you shouldn’t underestimate a child’s ability and provided an anecdote about her own granddaughter’s achievements in discovering how to create a report about a scientific experiment, where she had managed to work out how to locate photographs and other resources and edit them into a document without ever having been shown how to do so.

There was some discussion about languages such as Logo.

The discussion went on to the idea that customization of your phone with simple tools could be the first step to getting someone interested in programming. This could be something similar to the MS-Vista gadgets to provide useful little utilities. These may have the cool factor of being able to show off to their friends.

When someone reaches the limit of a simple visual development environment they may be motivated to find out more and learn a proper programming language.

It was an interesting discussion, but no real conclusions were made.